The heart of the Story Skills System is storytelling and character skills. It was designed to be a simple system where everything is a skill and, depending on your character and background, you can only be really good at some skills. A task (something to which you are going to apply …
When you think about it, a GM and an author are quite similar. Both are telling a story. The only difference is the medium and the audience. Of the two, running a game as a GM might be the harder option. As a GM you still have to spin a …
I know I said that a GM should be ready to TPK their players but that also means that, as the GM, you should have a plan to save your players. Assuming, of course, that you not playing a game that expects TPKs, you might want a few plans in place to …
One thing you learn as a GM is that sometimes you need to ensure that rolls are fixed. And that is okay. Here is why. When you transition from player to narrator (or GM), your long-ingrained sense of fair play makes fixing rolls feel like cheating. For a player, it would …
A good GM is a GM that is ready, willing, and able to kill player characters. A bad GM is one that enjoys doing so. I want to explain why a GM needs to be prepared to kill player characters and why it makes a better game for players and GM …
Goblin tactics include dirty fighting and ganging up. Standard goblin tactics for fighting stronger opponents is ambush followed by overwhelming numbers. Scar’s goblins take this one step further and are unusually well organised (for goblins). Goblins do not fight fair Scar’s goblins cheat. They attack in large swarms and will attempt …
TPK encounters are designed to catch players wrong-footed and expose them to the thrill of encounters that could actually threaten them. Many of these encounters involve goblins. For story purposes, I have crafted a backstory to tie these encounters together. You could run them back to back as the central …
I’m guessing I’ve probably lost about half of you with the headline but I’ve been giving some thought to a different way to do online games as a storytelling medium. Before you look at me and say something that offensive and probably mostly true, hear me out. You see I’m …
When designing games, we sometimes use the inverse square law. Warning: here be nerd-bate. The inverse square law is a lot easier to understand than the last round of maths geekery I posted. When geeky writers have a little too much time on their hands, they read geeky blogs and …
One of the limits I set myself for the Mad Science setting was encounters without combat. It’s right there in the introduction: There is no combat – solve your problems like a grown up. Encounters without combat: harder than it sounds S3 (which needs a better name) and the Mad Science …
